Andries Both Utrecht circa 1612/13 - 1642 Venice

Less yellowish/greenish in tone than catalogue illustration suggests. Laid down. Light wrinkling in paper, top right. Paper slightly discoloured at edges from old acidic mount, and a little dirty over all. Chalk nonetheless still very good and strong. Sold in a modern black wood frame.
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Though formerly attributed to David Teniers, this lively scene of diablerie is closely comparable to a small group of highly distinctive drawings of such themes by Andries Both.  One of these drawings is in the Lugt Collection¹, and three more passed through the auction rooms between 1942 and 2001.²  Three further drawings in Berlin, though representing religious and genre subjects rather than demonic scenes, are executed in exactly the same technique, and one of those is signed with Both's distinctive monogram, thus securing the attribution of the whole group.³  Those seven drawings are all executed in pen and ink, not black chalk, but Both did also work in chalk, and the details of the handling in these demonic figures is so close to what we see in the various pen drawings that there can be no question that the present work is also by Both.  

The tradition of representations of diableries was, of course, a long-standing one in Netherlandish art.  Such subjects were most extensively popularised by 16^th-century artists from Breugel to Bosch, but Jacques de Gheyn and others continued to make such drawings and prints well into the 17^th century, and the theme continued to be represented by artists as diverse as Cornelis Saftleven and Andries Both, whose common ground would otherwise seem to be limited to the fact that they grew up in Utrecht at around the same time.

1. Inv. no. 6633

2. Leipzig, C.G. Boerner, 19 February 1942, lot 413;  New York, Sotheby's, 13 January 1989, lot 28, and 23 January 2001, lot 147.  See the catalogue entry for this last sale for a more extensive discussion of these drawings.

3. E. Bock & J. Rosenberg, Die Zeichnungen alter Meister...Berlin...niederländischen Meister, 2 vols., Berlin 1930, nos. 551 (signed), 2265, 5442.